Essays on the economic logic of strikes.

Summary The fundamental lesson of Hicks' paradox was to highlight the need to anchor bargaining in time. The impossibility of justifying the emergence and perpetuation of strikes in a framework where agents are rational, perfectly and completely informed, has led to the development of sequential bargaining models with asymmetric information. In these models, the duration of a strike is synonymous with the acquisition of information within the firm. During the strike, the agents adjust their respective demands so that they become compatible. The duration of the strike then covers the time needed for the agents to become informed and to reveal their information, and is part of a bargaining process. However, this bargaining process remains unfavourable to the union. The union has an incentive to reduce the risk of a strike by improving the quality of its information. By observing previous negotiations in other firms, it is able to adapt its demands. The dissemination of information reduces the risk of strike action and increases the usefulness of the social partners. The strike, which is costly for some, is also a vector of information, thus reducing costs for others. In the case of trade union pluralism, the benefits linked to the dissemination of information remain. The econometric estimation of the model on French data, however, highlights the counteracting effects of the diffusion of information. The experimental analysis shows that unions revise their demands downwards when there has been a conflict during previous negotiations. However, the risk of strike action does not decrease. The experiment reveals the importance of benevolent considerations. The strike then appears as much as a revelation of a bad state of nature, as a reaction to a refusal of recognition by the employer. The games of duration make it possible to retranscribe the negotiation process as a whole. The strike appears as a possible second stage of the negotiation, the first stage being a waiting phase. These models make it possible to take into account the efficiency relations within the firm, as well as the recognition dimension of the demands. The duration of the negotiation process is no longer caused by delays in the acquisition of information but by dynamic inconsistencies. Econometric tests on French data allow us to justify the relevance of this type of modeling. The strike is only one stage in the bargaining process, which is itself integrated into an employment relationship made up of interactions within the firm and between firms.